I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns.
While there may be something to your theory, this is old news. Finland now experiences double digit unemployment of 10,9% with youth unemployment approaching 25%. They are now worst in EU, worse than Spain. The same for GDP per capita which stagnated basically since 2008. Their famous education and good results in PISA tests is also history as it plummeted from first place in 2006 to out of top 10 today. There is something rotten in state of Finland.
The latter is especially helpful at something like a T intersection when the sightlines are blocked and someone could come zooming along with very little advance warning.
I hate this for many reasons. First, just relax and sit back instead of blocking my view with your ugly head. Second, you do not know what I want to do, if I want to move slowly to let some pedestrian pass or start quickly to move before he reaches the crossing etc. Also, I am the one driving - your unhelpful and inconsistent advice is worth shit when of course sometimes you sleep or play with your cell phone etc.
I deliberately also do not do it when my wife is driving even if she sometimes asks for advice for exactly the same reason. She is the one 100% concentrated on driving. I cannot evaluate the situation in a second she gives me when she asks. I'd rather nap or think about Roman Empire or something instead of being useless backseat driver. We are not in a race where you need a navigator. If you cannot process the information, then slow down. If you are too tired to do even basics such as turning left, then let's switch and let me drive.
I actually think it is the only logical thinking they perform. If you truly believe in white privilege and that misogyny and patriarchy is ever-present and powerful, then of course you will make those associations on personal level, and you should date white privileged boys to eke out a little bit of that power for yourself. You would be stupid if you go for oppressed black handicapped weakling.
It is self-defeating nature of these movements, the same by the way goes for the other side of the spectrum, where some parts of the manosphere give advice to have many sexual partners. They at the same time resent women as hoes, but then they cannot help themselves and validate their own masculinity by sleeping with dozens or even hundreds of them - thus actually giving them value.
There is a saying that you are what you worship. If you worship power, this is how it logically ends.
You will still end up with a co-op President or maybe some circle of powerful union leaders sitting in cozy office deciding what to do with capital worth billions of dollars, while the rest of the schmucks would still need to punch their card and make steel, or whatever the anointed kings and counts of the factory decided to do.
I really do not understand why are people so enamored with politics as deciding mechanism for economic power. People are raging against the 1,000 billionaires in USA, but they think 1,000 top elected government bureaucrats are better deciding what to do with $4,9 trillion of tax revenue every year - we are talking potential net worth of $100 trillion plus? And that is the best case scenario - worst case you get some petty dictator who actually decides everything personally, effectively becoming as far from your cookie cutter billionaire as they are from homeless addicts on the street. There is not one billionaire now that could even lick a boot of people like Joseph Stalin, who could just say a word and the whole country of 100 million people and its whole capital stock would make his wish happen. But he was just an appointed leader of co-op labor councils - or soviets in Russian. What a bunch of nonsense.
In general geographical names are extremely common in Hungary. Not only countries, but also regions like Alföldi, but also cities such as Kecskeméty and of course rivers such as Tisza. It is just the way it is.
Locke commits the very thing I described as secular view of rights. He flipped the Thomist definition of natural laws on their head, he individualized and privatized the law. Instead of liberty being a positive effect of virtuous and God-fearing community, it is suddenly an entitlement by individual. The community is there to provide the service that the individual is entitled to, if the service is bad, the individual has to file the complaint. It is completely different framing.
In Thomist way of thinking, you yourself were born fallen due to original sin, you are prone to sin and debasement of your dignity. You are free only if you live in a virtuous community as part of the Church. In Lockean view this is subverted. You are entitled to freedom and all your rights from birth, you own it, it is your entitlement bestowed onto you by God or some such. Community can only deprive you of your entitlements, they literally stole what was given to you by God. In fact you as individual are in contract with community, you can judge if the community is worthy of you and renege on that contract if you think that your "rights" - your entitlements are not met. That is what I mean by "absent duty" - you can theoretically start judging the community as soon as you come out from the birth canal and immediately shake your little fists in indignant rage of how bad the community you were born into is. You can do that without lifting a finger or performing any duty.
Of course this does not surprise me, Locke was a protestant. So of course he would turn away from communal to individual - it is for everybody to become their own little god, pronounce ownership/stewardship of their very own god given rights, performing their very own exegesis of what it actually means and then judge the community for not subscribing to their view of morality and everything. In fact Locke encourages this as "right" to revolution - by the way this supposed "right" automatically shows how insufficient his logic is. Right to revolution sounds different from let's say right to property, especially when judging from the lense of duty - so now what, you have duty to accept other people revolting against percieved tyranny? So you will end up in the same fragmentation that you see with protestant church now. Again, it is dangerous change of view from sinful human achieving liberty only if existing as part of virtuous community providing just laws, to individual who is somehow capable of analyzing his God given rights without sin of pride or greed, judging society as sinful and unable to meet his individual yardstick of justice - up until violent revolution for this perceived sin of tyranny.
Which again ties to the original thing: yes, rights exist only as a fiction and they matter only as far as they are enforced. This is doubly so for Lockean rights, where everybody can have their own exegesis of what rights were given to them by god. If they judge the community as morally insufficient, they also have right to revolt or to view other people revolt as infringement on their own rights. This all only proves that even Lockean rights are made up by all individuals, and then only those versions that can be enforced at the point of the gun of revolutionaries matter. Especially if rights are stripped of the whole "given by god" veneer invented by Locke. For secularists, rights are just strongly worded made up laws, or maybe some supposed facts of biology (e.g. it is really "bad" if people suffer, therefore people have right to avoid suffering). This secular transformation of Christian natural law or Lockean fiction is even more obviously made up.
Wouldn't the Lockean Liberal view be something more like: mankind is created in the image and likeness of God. Yes, man is sinful, and fallen, but as a result of being made in the image of God, mankind is endowed with dignity which it is sinful to violate.
The set of principles surrounding this inviolable dignity, we call "rights" and it is the duty of us as individuals and as a society to set up governments which do not violate these rights.
This is a secular view of rights which is actually not in line with at least traditional teaching of Catholic Church. Yes, you are created in image of God and you have dignity, however you diminish your dignity every time you even sin yourself. You are not entitled to absolute dignity, e.g. you do not have absolute entitlement to get free food whenever you are hungry and thus turn this situation on its head by blaming the society for its inability to feed you. Even in Catholic church where they sometimes strategically adopt the language of rights, they are curtailed by additional concepts such as subsidiarity, where the duty starts with yourself. Which then conflicts with the basic definition of rights as entitlement without duty - you are the first to have duty to for instance feed yourself. That is the main difference between catholic social teaching and modern rights-based system.
In fact you can get to completely different conclusions. For instance if somebody who is able bodied and just lazy turns to get food from soup kitchen, it is that person who is committing the sin of sloth diminishing his own dignity. On top, he also steals from patrimony of the poor.
The liberal/libertarian simply believes that the best way to set up society is to let everyone pursue the proper management and development of their God-given talents by protecting a handful of core principles: life, liberty and property (or the pursuit of happiness.)
Absolutely not. The fundamental basis of libertarian view of right is that of self-ownership, the Catholic teaching is all about your life belonging to God. In libertarian view state cannot impose duties on you by virtue of self-ownership, exactly opposite is the case from Catholic teachings. And there are no few flaring points, we are talking about things like euthanasia, prostitution, drug sales and many other things.
As for liberal or secular view of rights, we talked about it before. And again, it is complete subversion of social teaching of the Church where individual is entitled to ever expanding set of rights and if not provided, it is society to blame for absence. Again, it is entitlement absent duty.
Don't most rights imply a corresponding duty?
Not really, at least not in the modern sense of what rights mean. Christians talked about duties all the time of course even in language of commandments etc. However there is understanding that people are sinful. It does not make sense to talk about "right", as it would entail basically living in an utopian society without sin.
Plus it creates quite a conundrum for libertarians who love to talk about intrinsic rights as property of individuals. If we are talking about duties, we now have collectivist category sometimes encompassing the whole humanity. For libertarian right to life to fully exist, everybody on Earth has to acknowledge and follow up on 6th commandment and duty not to murder.
Again, this is not equivalent position. Christians pray to god every day for miracle of life, that they were gifted by god fearing neighbors who follow the law and they understand that this is by no means given, that people are sinful. They understand how fragile things are. Human right activists approach the topic from entitlement to their rights and they are shocked and indignant if something happens. It is quite a different approach.
It actually leads to quite a different view of society. The original Christian view is that society (or Church if you wish) is generally good, but individual is sinful. The liberal or libertarian view seems to be that the individual is always correct and entitled to rights, but society is oppressive and sinful not to provide for such enlightened individual to exist.
Rights might be legal fictions in some sense, but so is money, or the concept of the United States, or the position of President of the United States.
Sure, that is all the OP wanted to say. Rights are fictional and subject to whims of people and governments. In a sense right is just a more fancy word for law. We can talk about various types of law from law from Hammurabi law to Universal Declaration of Human rights. All of them are of the same cloth, just a fiction in certain place and time subject to enforcement of some kind. There is nothing intrinsic to them.
Freedom of movement in article 13, freedom of assembly and association under article 20, freedom of religion under article 18 - all related to lockdowns for starters.
Rooted in natural law, it is objectively the case that different beings carry with them different moral duties and obligations.
Original natural law theory is Catholic doctrine stemming from objective morality and God, it was also more about natural law and less about natural rights, especially in the modern sense that right is personal and individual property. Additionally, modern rights do not have much with duties and obligations. Or to be more precise rights are entitlements absent duty or obligation. You are entitled to your right, you do not have any obligation toward that right.
It an aspiration - the universal declaration of human rights, say, is a declaration that we as a community have decided that human beings must be treated in this way.
If that is so, then some other community or even the same community but in different time can aspire to different set of rights which they will declare as universal. Just remember COVID when suddenly all those "universal human rights" stopped working for a prolonged time. Quite a fickle things these rights, they can change their way of existence quite a lot, can they not?
Materialists do not believe that nothing that isn't a physical object exists.
This is sophism. You absolutely understand what he wanted to say. He said that human rights exist as a fiction created by state as opposed to their existence as that of the sun or the moon. It is perfectly fine distinction to make even for materialists. Even materialists understand that let's say Francis Underwood exists as a fictional character and POTUS in famous Netflix TV show as opposed to let's say Donald Trump existing as a real person and POTUS. In similar fashion rights exist as a fiction enforced by power of government, that is all that the OP said and it is perfectly in line with materialism. Without government they still exist as a fiction, but nobody cares in the same way nobody cares for my version of fictional president of USA named Chad Norris or my version of universal human rights, that in my fictional world prevented government spying on email correspondence or property theft over prolonged period named as property tax. I hope now it is clear.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology.
I am not sure what is this about. If one evaluates Christianity, it is at worst a mix of deontology and virtue ethics.
I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I wholeheartedly agree
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
Again, it seems that you discovered virtue ethics. Christianity - or at least Catholicism - specifically talks about transcendentals of Good, Truth and Beauty. This is basic Thomas Aquinas, he talks about concepts related to beauty such as Claritas, Integritas, Consonantia, Honestas and their relation to the other transcendentals and also toward deontological concepts such as duty. For example if you act in accordance to your duty (of let's say POTUS) you radiate Claritas. It is often cited concept where duty formed by reason forms something beautiful when in action - e.g. when a worker honestly and dutifully pursues his craft, he creates beauty. One can also say the same about politics as a craft.
There is also great deal of wisdom in Catholic teaching when it comes to aesthetic morality. While sin is ugly, it can also lead to a dangerous sin of pride. Sometimes seeing ugly things all around you means something lacking on your part, inability of you as an observer to honestly judge correct aesthetics. In a sense it is lack of your inner beauty, replacing it with ugly sin of pride, which prevents you to see the harmony even in supposedly ugly things.
I would not underestimate this. There is a perfectly valid theory from liberation standpoint; that nobody is truly free unless the least free is liberated. If it produces seeming logical contradiction, then this is perfect as it means we need to do more Marxist work to align Marxist Theory and Praxis. Being able to hold contradictory opinions is a feature of Marxism, this is how you perform dialectic - you resolve the contradiction by abolishing the concepts and create something new and better. It is akin to dissolving the question. We may not see how such a reconciliation can look like now, but we have faith that such a solution exists if we try hard enough.
You for instance see it with feminists vs trans issues exemplified with simple "what is a woman" question. The true liberation will happen only if we abolish the gender binary completely. We did not manage it yet, but we are getting there. It is very similar to how the old school Marxists thought that capitalism and its opposite the socialism will eventually transform into true communism. The same for lets say how dictatorship of proletariat is only transitional period before bourgeoisie and proletariat will be "reconciled" by completely abolishing class as a concept and entering classless society. Again, nobody knows precisely how to do it, you need to do the work, that is the point.
It may all seem stupid and contradictory and all that. But for some reason these conspiracy theories are very resilient and they lived 150+ years already. They are internally coherent and people can believe them. You just need to understand the idea behind these concepts including the "lump theory" you describe, the crux of the leftist conspiracy theory that explains everything. I many times argued that leftism is where true conspiracy theories live, where "serious" people and respected academics can believe in conspiracies that deliberately oppress victims and create oppressive "systems" of - capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, colonialism etc. James Lindsay was more eloquent in his speech in EU parliament about it.
In fact with colonialism it is straightforward as it uses the same word. Colonizers are oppressors, colonized are the oppressed the evil system that colonizers create and perpetuate to keep their privilege is called colonialism, and the solution is to decolonize everything until we reach "Equity" - the ultimate "Social Justice" akin to communism. The same goes for leftist feminist theory where men oppress women via patriarchy and we need to dismantle the patriarchy to achieve social justice etc. It is all the same omnicause but in a more metalevel of intersectionality. So yes, decolonization and dismantling of patriarchy are related concepts, they both must proceed in order to establish true Equity and Social Justice. Don't know how, but we must believe such a progress is possible through proper work. And if it fails, it just means that true Social Justice was never tried.
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